Wednesday, February 11, 2015

My long term interest in traditional American music, American history, vintage instruments and acoustic science is
sort of the perfect storm – and the process started many years
ago.

First, I spent my
professional life as a university researcher in acoustics and signal
processing (Georgia Tech). It was a fine, satisfying and rewarding career –
my greatest visible success was setting the low bit rate speech
communication standard first for the US federal government and then
for NATO. As part of these activities I received the 2014 IEEE Jack Kilby Medal for Signal Processing. I spent 40 years immersed in
the science of sound and DSP.

I came from a
expatriate Appalachian family that immigrated to North Florida,
before and during the depression, to work in the construction
trades. My father, while in High School, had played in an
traditional string band. I played the grooves off of “Wabash
Cannonball” when I was a kid.

The other trick I
learned as a kid from my resourceful, craftsman family was how to
live better than your income by trading skills, searching for good
junk, and fixing stuff – the search for good deals was a major
and useful form of entertainment which I learned as a kid.

I was educated in
Boston (MIT) in the 60s, and acoustic folk revival music was the music of
my youth. I bought a Gibson LG-1 in 1962, played and sang “folk
music,” and met and married a “folk singer” –
who was beautiful, has a great voice and also was a trained
biologist who supported me through my graduate education. A killer
combination!

After coming to
Atlanta to work in 1971, I developed a huge interest in 19th
and 20th century American history – I pretty much
gave up recreational reading for the study of history for about 20
years. This also included the history of 20th American
music. My wife also loved to search for bargains at flea markets and
such, and we decorated our lives and home with historical artifacts
– many of these were (usually cheap) musical instruments which
we could also play.

Somewhere in the
early days we came up with a vintage Martin – a 1943 00-17
that was actually in good playing condition. Well it blew us away –
we had never heard anything like that! We would just put that guitar
on the couch and play individual notes and listen to them until they
faded out – we were hooked.

In the late 1970 we
found the bluegrass culture of the Southern Mountains –
populated with people who shared the cultural values (and dialects)
of my youth. As folkies, we believed this to be a dying culture
fading into history – what was found was anything but. The
music was an intrinsic part of the culture and was very powerful –
it made our puny folkie skills almost irrelevant. Virtuosity was
common, not only on the instruments (guitar, banjo, fiddle, mandolin
and bass), but also in the extreme vocal styles of the mountains. We
heard things in those misty mountain parking lot jams that we did
not believe were possible – something so strong it could never
be captured on stage or in recording.

The bluegrass culture
of the 1970s was also an instrument culture, albeit narrowly focused
– mostly on old Martin dreads, prewar Gibson mandolins and
banjos, fiddles, and old Kay basses. These instruments were
discussed hour after hour, and passed around between songs in the
endless jam sessions in the parking lots of small mountain
festivals. By the late 70s, this community already knew all the stuff
that the rest of the world would not recognize for another 25 years.

So by 1980, all the pieces
were in place – a shared (with my wife) love of traditional
music, an aspiration to be part of the traditional bluegrass
community, a scientific interest in sound, and a drive to find
bargains. Well I have always been better able to make money by
building things (my degree is in engineering) than by investing –
I just never had the passion to learn the stuff I would need to know
to invest in the stock market. So when were were looking for a way to
store retirement money, vintage instruments seemed like a good
alternative. Here we did have the passion to know (and to play) –
so we decided we would allow about 10% of our retirement money to be
invested in instruments.

And so it started. My goal
was not to collect instruments, but to collect historic sounds. Thus
we never (or seldom) bought multiple copies of the “same”
instrument. A major focus is bluegrass instruments because we aspire
to play that, but also “lesser” instruments to populate
our broader traditional and folk revival interests. From an
investment perspective, we often bought classes of instruments which
were not “hot” – D-18s rather than D-28s, 000s
rather than dreads, and (if truth be told) Gibsons rather than
Martins.

Our passion exploded in
the 1990s when I needed a lot of stress release from intense
technological professing and entrepreneuring – we wanted
something that did not have anything to do with technology.

I am now retired and guess
I can say I am living my dream – really our dream, because this
was all done with my wife. We have a bluegrass band (THE NEXT BAND), which has slowed
down now but which played a lot starting in the early 1990s. We are
not really good musicians in a profession sense, but we gig maybe 40
times a year and play in three of four times that many sessions of
various sorts. People bring me instruments all the time so I can play
them. And we have a great collection of old instruments which we get
to interact with every day.

We were inducted into the “Hall or
Honor” of the Atlanta Country Music Hall of Fame in 2006.

The people we have met, the music we have played, and the stories we have heard are breathtakingly beautiful. You can't make this stuff up -- no one would believe you!

My name is Tom Barnwell. I have decided to start a blog on my three favorite topics: Traditional American Music, Vintage American Instruments, and acoustic science. Stay tuned for the beginning of the story.